zig-pcre:
Hi Community,
I was developing a web application using http.zig (Purely from @karlseguin). At one moment, I wanted to validate user inputs using regular expressions. I searched the internet for most widely used and fast regular expression engines and found PCRE2.
To make things easier I wrote a simple abstraction over libpcre2 wrapping with Zig code. I saw that libpcre2 has it’s own build.zig. But wanted to omit that since PCRE2’s own CmakeLists.txt battle tested for years. Their own team maintain a stable CmakeLists.txt Cmake based build mechanism than PCRE2’s own build.zig.
build.zig is a moving target since Zig language is in it’s development stage (I’m pretty sure Zig is at the edge of it’s journey becoming v1.0. Even if it is not Zig feels stable). Instead of relying 100% on build.zig for compiling pcre2 library .c source files, I triggered PCRE2’s CmakeLists.txt cmake build mechanism keeping libpcre2 as a git submodule via b.addSystemCommand(). And linked final libpcre.a to the mdoule code written in Zig.
If the zig-pcre design fully depend on build.zig, build issues may arise when compiling with the new versions of zig releases and it will take some time to apply the changes for zig-pcre to be compatible with new Zig versions. But making build.zig shorter and harnessing the power of cmake build, I let PCRE2 to build by itself.
Additionally for the cmake compile I used zig cc and zig c++ as compillers. By doing this I’m 100% sure whatever .a comes out can co-exist with Zig code with no other compiler involvement.
This is one of the most iconic advantage in Zig; It’s ability to pack everything into a single static binary so that the final executable can run anywhere. With This ability, Zig can compete with Go-ficators and Rusti-ficators.
I know this zig-pcre may not be adopted by majority but with this little approach I wish there will be no room for [other hype based language]-ficators to play and Ziguana ecosystem will be more stable and powerfull.
https://codeberg.org/rishithaminol/zig-pcre
Supported Zig versions
0.16.0
0.17.0-dev and onwards
AI / LLM usage disclosure
AI was not used in this project. Specially there are no vibe-coded particles.
Since my knowledge on English is moderate level, I had to use AI for preparing some parts of README.md to express what in my mind.